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It was dusk in the ancient city of Kathmandu, and we were coming to the end of a long walk when I suddenly realized what had happened: My daughter had grown up.

Meg and I had come to Nepal to retrace the steps she'd taken several months earlier during a junior-year semester abroad. She was now 21 and showing me the world, letting me see up close why she had fallen in love with this skinny Himalayan country wedged between China and India. We were walking that evening to visit a family she had lived with for seven weeks, and with each step, it seemed, our old roles were reversing: The daughter was protecting the father.

Meg and Phil Roosevelt in Jomsom, Nepal
Courtesy of the Roosevelts

When we came to a major roadway and started to cross, Meg extended an arm firmly across my chest; a swarm of motorcycles and boxy little cars came whizzing around the corner. As we passed a small grocery store with goods out front, Meg diverted my attention until it was well behind us. "There was a severed goat's head back there," she said. "I didn't want you to see it." When we reached the outskirts of Kathmandu and started to lose our way, Meg used her command of the Nepali language to coax directions from the locals and get us to dinner safely and on time.

Where would I have been without her?

FROM ALMOST THE MOMENT Meg got home from her semester in Nepal this past December, she wanted to return. I had grown curious, too. Meg's texts, e-mails, and photos from Nepal had been riveting. I was especially taken by her reports on the hip young monks. These Buddhist scholars sat around the cafes of Kathmandu with iPads on their laps, their robes hiked just enough to reveal florescent Nikes. One night Meg went bowling with some of them, which seemed almost too much to plumb. My daughter bowls with Buddhist monks, I kept telling myself. Meg is halfway around the globe and she's bowling with monks. Now maybe I'd meet them.

The trip would also be a chance to learn some more about semesters abroad, which have been surging in popularity. The number of U.S. college students studying overseas has tripled over the past two decades, to about a quarter of a million a year. At Meg's school, Kenyon College in Gambier, Ohio, about half the junior class goes abroad. The experience had clearly broadened Meg's horizons and lifted her confidence, just as it was supposed to, but what exactly had gone on?

Most importantly, our trip would be an opportunity to go on a real adventure with Meg, perhaps the last chance before she became swept up in the urgencies of senior year and a first job. We would go for 10 days, the longest stretch we'd ever spent together without one of her two brothers around.

We were each bound to learn something.

ON OUR FIRST DAY IN NEPAL, Meg took me to meet one Manav Archaya, a gregarious man of 35 who runs a wholesale clothing business in the main shopping district of Kathmandu, the nation's capital. He had been Meg's "brother" when she lived with his family, which in a way meant I was his "father." We shook hands vigorously.

Manav eased his small Hyundai into the traffic and took Meg and me for a wild ride through the streets of his city. Like all the other drivers, he stayed in the left lane unless the right lane looked like more fun. "The only rule is not to hit someone else," Manav said. He stepped on the gas and let out peels of laughter.

Looking out the window, I noticed something: This wasn't Ohio anymore. While Kathmandu has some beautiful historic districts, replete with exotic, wooden temples, it's essentially a big, dirty, impoverished city of 1.4 million. Smog and dust are everywhere. People burn their trash in the streets. The stench of sewage is at times overwhelming. The tap water is completely undrinkable. Power outages are frequent. As all of this suggests, Nepal's government is dysfunctional. Over the years, it has swung between paralysis and upheaval, and that shows no signs of stopping. During our visit, the latest iteration of the government, a democratic republic, missed an important deadline for adopting a constitution.

And yet, Meg seemed at home. In just four months, she had learned Nepali surprisingly well, and in a land where virtually all prices are up for negotiation, she had learned how to haggle with style -- firmly but in good humor. She routinely cut cabbies' offers by 20% or more. She knew more about doing business in a truly foreign country than most American professionals know before they're sent to one, be it Nepal, Ghana, or Bolivia.

The two travelers left their mark on a cliff in the Himalayas.
Courtesy of the Roosevelts

Meg knew what it was like to really live in the place. For two weeks of her earlier stay, she'd lived alone above a cafe in a small room with two beds and a shared bathroom in the hall. We stayed in the same guesthouse -- in fact, in the same room -- for most of our time in Kathmandu. We dined almost exclusively on her favorite dish, daal bhaat, which is rice smothered with lentils, often topped with bits of chicken and sometimes quite spicy. I, too, came to love it. Over heaping plates of daal bhaat, we talked about Nepal, school, and our lives. We talked about Meg's twin brother and his interest in cooking, and her older brother and his new job in Washington. We talked about books, music, the world, and the future. There is nowhere else I would rather have been.

SUFFICE IT TO SAY, not all students decide to go to Nepal. It does not even rank among the top 25 countries for U.S. students studying abroad. The U.K. is No. 1, followed by Italy, Spain, and France. China has roared up to No. 5 as students prepare for roles in the global economy of tomorrow. But Meg had her reasons for choosing Nepal: It fit with her major, anthropology; she likes to go hiking; and, she concluded, she might otherwise never get there.

Kenyon connected her with SIT Study Abroad, which runs programs for U.S. students around the world. Part of a Vermont-based nonprofit, SIT specializes in "experiential" education -- students are immersed in the local languages and cultures and pushed to find their way in the communities.

When Meg and I approached the residential house where SIT operates in Kathmandu, three of her language teachers came out to greet the long-lost "Mahimaa," the local name she'd been given for the semester. I immediately took a shine to one of them, Chandra Rana. A pensive man who peers at the world through thick glasses, Rana, 40, had grown up in a village in the Himalayas, earned a masters degree in sociology in Kathmandu and written an authoritative guide to Nepali for English-speaking students. At SIT, he both teaches language and tends to logistics for the students' extensive trekking. Periodically, he gets on his motorcycle and rides five hours into the mountains to visit his relatives. Rana struck me as the real deal, a perfect instructor for Meg about the ways of Nepal.

For nearly two hours, Mahimaa and her teachers sat out on a lawn and bantered, first in English, then in Nepali. As I watched, I made a judgment: The $22,000 all-in cost for the program had been money well spent. Even if Meg never came to Nepal again, learning a complex language like this, and mastering the culture, was sure to enrich her understanding of words and the world. The fact that so many other American students are going abroad, it seemed to me, bodes well for the character of the country and the strength of its businesses.

One man, however, thinks I'm dead wrong. Leon Botstein, president of Bard College outside New York, argues that most semesters abroad, whether experiential in Nepal or academic at Oxford, amount to glorified tourism. Almost none of them, he says, can substitute for the rigors of an American college. When I told Botstein what Meg had done, and how pleased I was about it, a tone of pity crept into his voice. "You sound like a kindly father," he said.

FRANKLY, I DON'T SEE THE HARM in enjoying a little tourism with your studies. So, just as Meg's class had done, we prepared to fly on a 20-seat propeller plane deep into the Himalayas. Knowing what lay ahead and her father's aversion to heights, Meg asked a pointed question of our local travel agent: "Is this flight safe?" The agent glanced at his boss, who didn't miss a beat: "There's only one crash a year, and it's already happened." We proceeded to buy two round-trip tickets.

Since the plane couldn't fly as high as the peaks, it weaved and tilted its way around them, sometimes floating so close to the mountain sides that you could practically see individual trees and branches. Then, suddenly, the pilot pointed the plane sharply downward and dove, pulling the nose up just in time to land on the tiny airstrip at Jomsom, Nepal. We were not only alive, we were at the entry point to the Annapurna range, a spectacular array of 43 peaks ranging in height from 17,000 feet to 27,000 feet. Meg had lived with a family here for a week, so once again she knew the terrain.

Soon we were on a long day-hike along the Kali Gandaki River, which cuts a deep gorge through the mountains. The river was dried out for our visit, but within a few weeks it would be flooded by the monsoons. We passed the rustic Jimi Hendrix Restaurant, where the guitar god had stayed back in the days when hippies flocked to Nepal for enlightenment and hashish. We picked through the rocks of the riverbed for fossils, and rested in the shade beside cliffs. At one of them, Meg did our bit for eternity, etching our names next to those of many other travelers.

We walked, talked, and sometimes did nothing but listen to the mountain wind. Quiet times like that became some of my best memories of the trip. Once, while out in a rented skiff on a lake closer to Kathmandu, we stopped paddling and just drifted, silently enjoying each other's company and taking in the beautiful scene.

Meg pilots a skiff on Lake Phewa.
tCourtesy of the Roosevelts

HEADING INTO THE FINAL DAY of the trip, there was only one thing I wanted to see that we hadn't seen: the bowling monks. They had gone to Texas, for some reason. But we had plans to visit Boudha, one of the holiest Buddhist sites in Kathmandu, and there was no telling who we might meet. As we sipped coffee in a cafe, we spotted a monk who was clearly American and probably in his mid-50s. He was reading a newspaper and complaining about the news to a friend. I imagined that in an earlier time this monk had been a tax lawyer. Meg leaned over to me and whispered: "He looks like he could be someone's da-a-a-ad."

Ah, that tone. It was the sound of young Americans talking about their elders -- incredulity mixed with embarrassment and a touch of scorn. It was pleasing to see there was still something of the child in Meg. And she had a point: I hadn't come all the way to Nepal to meet another da-a-a-ad. We stopped looking for monks, went outside and joined the throngs walking clockwise around a big, circular stupa, or temple. This form of walking is said to help meditation, and I did some thinking of my own. Without the help of a young monk or an older one, I had made the kind of discovery that every parent hopes to make: My child had become proficient at life. Now in her 21st year, she had learned how to find her way in this often difficult world. She had gained biswass, the Nepali word for confidence.

There were only a few hours left before we had to be at the airport, so we did what we wanted to do the most: We kept on walking, around and around.